Presenter(s): Gina Svarovsky, Science Museum of Minnesota, gsvarovsky@smm.org Amy Grack Nelson, Science Museum of Minnesota, agnelson@smm.org Abstract: Evaluation projects involving evaluators distributed across the country can have several benefits, but also present a range of challenges. The Science Museum of Minnesota will share their experiences and lessons learned from two distributed evaluation projects. One is an evaluation exploring the communication structures within the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (nisenet.org), the other is a collaborative synthesis of evaluation reports posted on the website informalscience.org. Both projects involve a team of evaluators from multiple organizations working together to create a shared vision for the study, finding the best online tools to facilitate collaborative work, cooperatively defining and refining coding categories, coordinating multiple coders within the same NVivo project, and orchestrating reporting to various stakeholders. Session participants will gain insight and share their own ideas about how to conduct these types of distributed evaluation projects and address ways to overcome challenges that naturally arise during this type of collaborative work. #evalutionteams #2012Conference #Collaborative,ParticipatoryandEmpowermentEval #Cluster,Multi-SiteandMulti-LevelEval #ArtsCultureandAudiences #collaborativetools